Buried with Him

Baptism means to plunge, to immerse. Whether you have already gone under the water or you are getting ready to, Paul tells you what it is: a burial. "We were buried with Him by baptism into death." Your old life, the one dead through trespasses and sins, was put in the ground with Christ. That is why baptism is by immersion. You cannot bury someone with a sprinkle.

And something happened in the water that you could not see. Peter said to be baptised "so that your sins may be forgiven". Ananias told Paul: "Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on His name" (Acts 22:16). Peter writes that baptism "now saves you", and then explains that it is "not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ." Self-reformation cannot do that. Good works cannot do that. God does it, and He has chosen to do it there.

Now the name. Every time the book of Acts tells us what was said at a baptism, it was the name of Jesus: in Jerusalem, in Samaria, in the house of Cornelius, in Ephesus. "There is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Jesus is the name given from heaven before He was born, the name that is above every name, and the power of His blood is wrapped up in it. That is why you were baptised in it, and why Apostolic churches will not baptise any other way. If you were baptised before in another form, this is why we baptise again, as Paul did at Ephesus in Acts 19. If that has already happened to you, now you know why. If it is still ahead of you, this is what it is for.

Now the name.

Someone will ask you about Matthew 28:19, where Jesus says to baptise "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." Read it carefully. It says name, singular, not names. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not names; they are what God is to us. The name is Jesus. The apostles who heard Jesus say those words were the same men who, ten days later, told the crowd to be baptised "in the name of Jesus Christ" (Acts 2:38), and they never did it any other way. Paul sums up the principle: "whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus" (Colossians 3:17). Baptism is something you do in word and deed. So it is done in His name.

Baptism must be mixed with faith to work. Paul says you were "raised with Him through faith in the power of God" (Colossians 2:12). A dunking without faith is a bath. But faith with baptism is a burial, and a burial is the first half of a resurrection.